AUTHORS: Matt Harlow, DJ Case & Associates; Holly Mauslein, DJ Case & Associates; Tanna Wagner, Kansas Department of Wildlife and Parks
ABSTRACT: A lot of effort has been put into making state fish and wildlife agencies more relevant to broader audiences. To this end, AFWA’s Education, Outreach and Diversity Committee created the National Conservation Outreach Strategy in 2018. This strategy provided a toolkit that enabled each state fish and wildlife agency to increase awareness of its role in protecting and conserving wildlife. In 2019, the “Making It Last” campaign was pilot-tested to help learn how to best “tell the state story” to boost relevancy with the public, followed by a second phase to fine-tune and further test the initiative. However, states’ limited budgets and uncertainty regarding the campaign’s effectiveness reduced the number of states able to implement and evaluate the campaign. With the relevancy topic becoming more critical every year, the need existed to field a rebranded and tested campaign accompanied by improved toolkit materials and evaluations. With four participating state agencies from Kansas, Vermont, South Carolina, and California, this project advances the public case for why fish and wildlife agencies matter across the nation. This third phase focused on engaging more states by rebranding away from the “Making It Last” theme to a more directly relevant brand and messaging content. These new resources were developed using public testing via focus groups, best practices, and lessons learned in previous phases of this campaign. We focused on updating and upgrading the story of state-based conservation through messaging and materials designed to resonate better with the public and agency staff. The result is a campaign that more state agencies can utilize to increase public awareness and support, especially among audiences not traditionally engaged in conservation or fish and wildlife-based recreation.
